The Eviction Tracking System: Monitor the number of U.S. eviction cases
evictionlab.org
evictionlab.org
Then I realized how many people would fight till their last dying breath to keep that data from coming to life to prevent the exposure of their crimes. And I don't just mean high level national officials but the thousands of county and municipal people all across the country that have their little practically harmless side graft going on.
"When you get the data into a nice, clean, dense form, stuff just falls out of it" - Saul Pwanson
(https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-plagiarism-scandal-is...)
Huh! I recently "discovered" this myself because sometimes when I was stuck on crosswords I would google the clue and the answers would show all the different places and puzzles the clue has appeared. I just assumed that all crosswords everywhere sourced the same question databank and everyone stole clues and reprinted them everywhere else based on how many times they've appeared in various places. Didn't realize crosswords were even supposed to be originally written!
Fwiw, have been more into NYTimes Tiles games lately :) Interesting link- thnx!
More importantly, prior to clicking on the article, I would have bet a lot of money that Saul Pwanson was Paul Swanson's Twitter handle.
Event logging and functional system design help a lot, but they have all sorts of problems too.
Don’t forget privacy! The people who lose the most from publicizing eviction info are the ones being evicted. They’d never be able to rent again.
That’s why many jurisdictions seal eviction info.
We have to start small. Focus on local politics. Look for neighbors with signs in their yard. Take note of who's voting for who. Build a like minded network.
A lot of people focus on the issue of abortion because it's the most linked issue to Democrat/republican. Animal testing is actually the most divisive issue. And it's not correlated with Democrat/republican. It's the perfect topic to create bipartisan relationships. But start with very very local issues.
I need to practice what I preach
Most people appearing in court don’t want the contents of their proceedings made public.
This isn’t political at all. It’s isn’t practical or advisable enough to be political.
Just look at the World Wide Web. It’s like that, but more complicated.
A very good friend of mine is a legal librarian. She has more formal education than a doctor. Peoples lives depend on her doing her job, and it’s hard as heck.
This isn’t something you can automate away.
The info systems are complicated because the domain is complicated.
Imagine: person A and person B create a partnership in the Cayman Islands. However they agree any disputes between the London Commercial Court. Do I even need to continue?
Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"
I find it far more likely that government buracracies like court systems simply don't spend the money or have the expertise rather than are in a USA-wide cabal against opening their data (when the data is already available in small amounts).
I follow various landlord forums because I feel like one day I may want to start a business related to it. Landlords worry most of all about tenants destroying a building, and having no legal recourse. With eviction courts shutdown, many have had tenants just stop paying rent- often times when the tenants still have their income, some times more income than they had before. The tenants in many cases won't communicate with the landlords about the situation.
Obviously, you mileage may vary depending on where you are, and I have had my share of problems with lying, slumlords (like the one I sued)- but that isn't the majority of them. Most are just trying to run a business.
Should we live in a world where people can take other people’s property with no recourse?
Sometimes yes, other times no they should be void or unenforceable. Quick example: an employee non-compete clause in California (which are illegal in California but employers include them regularly)
>Should we live in a world where people can take other people’s property with no recourse?
Like the colonist (and later Americans) took the property and land of native Americans?
Or like squatting where one party acquires legal title to property from the own after x years? This is generally legal.
Or like eminent domain where rich people get the local government to take private property on their behalf?
One of the great ironies the great capitalist Trump has quite the history of supporting The taking of lands /property to be given to developers, and the scary socialist Bernie sanders has fought against these acts to uphold Private property rights.
Take “Poletown” where GM got the government to seize 1,500 homes, 144 businesses and 16 churches and bulldoze them to the ground to build a GM plant.
Ultimately GM provided half the number of promised jobs and ultimately closed the plant.
I fear what we are seeing now is 20-40M Americans lost their jobs, nearly that many will become homeless in the near future, and ultimately they will be swept under the rug (just removed from employment numbers And every other program like they don’t even exist). Watch unemployment Numbers go back to 5% or so and the politicians go back to bragging about the economy. Once you have 40M+ homeless there is no possibility for them to organize and have a voice...they won’t even have the literal energy to survive let alone effect change, they will be steamrolled just like poletown was and no one will ever even know not unlike poletown.
Landlords can opt out of the rental market if they aren’t earning enough. Tenants have no such luxury.
It would strongly support homeownership.
If “owners” couldn’t buy up multiple properties and become landlords but could only own 1 homestead...then property values would drop and renters would be capable of affording to own in mass.
Unfortunately, we are about to see in short order what happens when renters stop paying rent in mass and landlords stop paying mortgage in mass.
Hint: the renters and owners (collectively “taxpayers“) will both be robbed by their representatives again, and congress will bail out banks (again) so the banks can foreclose (on owners) and evict (renters).
Great! Housing shouldn't be an investment anyway. There's no reason it has to be; there are plenty of places -- like Japan -- where houses are depreciating assets that expected to be torn down when the owners leave.
Japan has a declining population, which means that rural housing actually can have zero buyers for it, where the population is lower than the number of houses. One in seven buildings in Japan is actually vacant [0].
If their population was increasing faster than housing construction, then housing would actually increase in cost.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-29/japan-s-s...
The reason prices aren't high is that nobody wants to live in an old house. "Old" being 15 years old or more. Even with renting apartments, if it's older than 7-8 years old, agents will almost warn you that the property isn't exactly fresh and sparkling, but it's still not bad. If it's a pre-90s house, it's considered basically unwanted and they'll all but try to give it away. Meanwhile, 90s homes in the US are still marketed as pretty new, and demand seems to be higher for older homes than newer ones. America also has loads of empty houses. It also has loads of property owners who refuse to lower prices because their ego is worth more than their property. Apparently about 1/8 American homes are currently vacant, and the population isn't declining. Price and desirability are the problems.
Japan, is also no stranger to real estate bubbles, having experienced perhaps the worst real estate bubble in modern history in the 90s:
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/08/japan-199...
"At their peak, prices in central Tokyo were such that the Tokyo Imperial Palace grounds were estimated to be worth more than all the land in the entire state of California."
http://www.indianapolisrecorder.com/news/article_b27a7cf6-1d...
https://www.reddit.com/r/UrbanHell/comments/5gx86v/russian_a...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Petare_Slums_in_Cara...
Authenticity of the reddit post aside, do you have the slightest knowledge of urban development in the Soviet Union, or like, anywhere, or do you just regurgitate links?
A lotta shit got built 'cause you need to house a lot of people after your country's major urban centers got basically raized to the ground, the surrounding countryside along with it, alongside continuing rural->urban migration. Ain't particularly easy to do that well while also trying to recover your economy from a massive fucking brutal invasion.
Yes, Khrushchevkas aren't exactly marvels of architectural longevity; they were never intended to be. They were supposed to last maybe 30-40 years at best, and they're still standing. Sure, they're shoddy and they look like shit now, the countries that built them lacked the capital to replace them as intended--that's another history lesson, but whatever. You mock them for carrying on shambling well past their intended use? They should be lauded for lasting as long as they have, with what limited resources and tight constraints under which they were originally built.
Point is, you want the government to cheap housing and fund it as such, it does so, and the output sometimes ends up surpassing your original goals! You put funding into producing good housing and government can do that too! You ever been to Singapore? You ever hear about the sprawling abject rotten slums of Singapore, that dominate the whole of the nation? No? Curious that.
Would be really fucking strange to hear that a government could build a lot of good housing for its populace and still succeed economically, I suppose, but hey, they did it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore
Do you have any additional info?
Renters are locked out because they don't have down payments. They can't save down payments because rent takes all the extra money.
The sort of instability that renting creates, contributes heavily to the poor performance of children in school.
Why should banks give out personal loans where someone can do whatever they want with the money? Why do credit cards exist? Why are brokers allowed to provide margin accounts?
From the perspective of a bank it's a great deal. Either they get the premiums and interest on a loan or if the landlord defaults, they get the asset. But think of it in terms of the community. This helps concentrate wealth for the wealthy. People with lots of assets are more likely to qualify for a loan and they can afford higher house prices than those with less. This can cause cost of housing in residential areas to increase and lead to locking out new residents from becoming home owners in the area they live.
> Why should banks give out personal loans where someone can do whatever they want with the money?
Personal loans have higher premiums, higher interest rates and lower limits because they are not backed by high value assets.
> Why do credit cards exist? Why are brokers allowed to provide margin accounts?
The simple answer is that they are profitable to the providers.
I don't think high eviction rates are signs of a healthy society.
What profit? The landlord has a $10,000/month mortgage payment and 10 tenants who pay $1000/month rent. If three of the tenants stop paying their rent and you can't evict them and replace them with paying tenants, you still have a $10,000/month mortgage, so now you have to raise the rent on the others by >$400/month each just in order to make the payment.
It's systemic, so all the other landlords are in the same situation and have to do the same thing, which means you can raise the rent by that much without losing tenants to the competition.
The people getting the extra money that the other tenants are paying aren't the landlords, they're the tenants who are living there without paying rent because they can't be evicted. And you can imagine what happens when the other tenants can't afford the higher rent and stop paying too.
If you yourself are going to be involved in a case it's a good idea to sit in a few trials so you get an idea of how things go.
What is malice anyway? You have to be intentionally harming someone? What if you're materially better off because other people are hurt? What if that makes it impossible to even see that people are hurt? Is that stupidity? Does it make any difference?
In my experience, fiefdoms and graft are much more common in the private sector. Nobody can be voted out or replaced when their boss is voted out. Nobody even cares as long as the long term profits are ok.
https://qri.cloud/xristosk/nyc_evictions_2020
disclaimer: I work for qri.io.
You could just e-mail the landlord 'sorry, I'm broke and don't have any money right now, feel free to waste time in court if you'd like'. 80-90% chance they'd just let the fee go. Then if they did, another 70-80% chance it'd be dismissed by a judge or magistrate.
People put one-sided things in contracts, but the odds are very high that they could never actually enforce them
You'd be better off offering to pay some very small amount, pretending as though you were acting in good faith. Regardless of the merits of the contract, judges tend not to like 'I dare you to enforce the law' taunts.
I just think people on HN being unrealistic about how real estate law actually works is part of why these comments sections are filled with 'landlords are evil', left-wing populism. A huge huge number of tenants are going to simply not pay their landlords in this recession, and in practice the landlord has zero recourse. Millions of tenants are going to skip out on billions in rent, and it's not like a judge is going to enforce all these judgments in over-crowded housing court or small claims court or something. When the courts reopen, months from now, with a massive backlog.
This is doubly true for blue state judges. If you add up all the court cases in blue states where the defendant says 'sorry, I lost my job, I can't finish my lease or pay the termination fee or whatever', their win rate is like 90-95%+
>Some states have passed temporary eviction moratoria
>Once these measures expire, however, millions of renters will owe significant amounts of back rent. For many, a displacement and eviction crisis will follow the public health crisis.
> Eviction filings in Boston, MA have fallen sharply since eviction proceedings were suspended across Massachusetts on March 17.
I think it's perfectly fine (even more desirable) to show accurate data rather than only show data which "corresponds with their thesis". It's probably more valuable to have the data for this lull before the homeless cliff happens.
The point that eviction proceedings are suspended is also totally relevant, and their thesis in the long term may be accurate. But their way of showing data here is counterproductive to conveying that understanding. Worse, if we imagine that the pandemic has had no impact on evictions and that things will just resume to normal levels once the suspensions are over, the dashboard is going to flare red and look apocalyptic.
For the record, I do think the pandemic is going to have a fairly severe impact on housing problems. I just don't think this is a good way to show it. You need charts over time with well labeled events that are affecting the data.
> The COVID-19 pandemic has deepened America’s housing crisis. The nation’s most severe public health emergency in a century may cause large spikes in eviction and homelessness. In response, we have created the Eviction Tracking System to monitor weekly updates on the number of eviction cases being filed across the United States. Scroll down to view full reports on the cities in which we are operating, and to learn more about the project.
They are aligning themselves with one side of an issue. Whether you agree with them or not, it does demonstrate a bias.
The language used is editorialized. Words like "crisis" or "large spikes" express an opinion rather than a fact. They could have made quantitative statements about homelessness, evictions, or the shortage of housing to let the reader decide whether this is a crisis or what constitutes a large spike.
Even if you agree with their bias, it is important to avoid expressing bias since it may undermine the very issue that you want to address. For example: landlords may be unsympathetic to this language, even though it will affect them negatively.
An advocacy group that examines an issue from a singular point-of-view risks alienating those facing similar issues yet hold other perspectives, thus shutting down dialogue. It becomes a power struggle, rather than finding solutions through commonalities and balancing conflicting interests. This is not to say that non-confrontational approaches are perfect, but they provide a much more solid foundation for negotiation.
However a problem with presented data aggregation, combined with a clear policy objective, is that many will assume the data is cherry-picked to suit the policy objective, and the aggregation is therefore unreliable, low quality data, subject to suspicion.
An analogous situation, politically in the other direction, is occurring with number of COVID-19 deaths reported. Everybody who cares knows it is substantially under-reporting the true number, because it only reports confirmed, tested COVID-19 cases. Yet it is usually presented as "the" number of deaths, and discussed as though that is the factual number.
I would find this data interesting for a variety of purposes.